Everything you need to know about Fhenix, its founder Guy Zyskind, and lead investor Kyle Samani
Privacy is a delicate issue that goes from guaranteeing fundamental rights such as freedom of speech for the average Joe, to being a matter of life-or-death for dissidents, journalists and whistleblowers. As result I think it’s very important to not take anything at face value but to do due diligence when it comes to privacy projects, especially FHE ones since homomorphic encryption is the holy grail of privacy which means it’s also very attractive to scammers who want to monetize on the narrative without really caring about delivering privacy tools. With this in mind now let’s break down Fhenix.
Who is the Founder of Fhenix?
The Founder of Fhenix is crypto serialpreneur Guy Zyskind. As also shown in his Linkedin profile, Fhenix is not Guy’s first privacy project as he is also the founder of Secret Labs.
Secret Labs is the company that developed Secret Network. Today Secret Network claims to be a programmable layer one capable of offering programmable privacy. Secret community however is non-existent and the network is also notorious for regularly shutting down, just like Solana but much more often.
What’s worse is that Secret was found to have a master key that allowed to de-anonymize all transactions from genesis. Quote from the researchers that found the vulnerability:
But the researchers didn’t have to become fully-fledged network validators to exploit the bug. They were able to extract their Secret Network master key by running a full node (which anyone can do) with a machine powered by the vulnerable processors.
Was this an intentional backdoor or a bug? Hard to tell.
Who are the lead investors of Fhenix?
According to official press releases the seed round funding was led by Multicoin Capital and Collider Ventures.
Kyle Samani was an FTX advisory board member and very close to Sam Bankman-Fried. Today we know that when Terra Luna collapsed in May 2022 it inflicted the death blow to Alamaeda Research and FTX. That’s when the liquidity crisis started for FTX and that of course was kept hidden at the time. Being part of its advisory board, and close to Sam, it’s hard to think that Kyle didn’t know FTX was practically insolvent.
Despite that he publicly endorsed FTX on Twitter such as in the following contagion collapse is bullish for FTX tweet that has since been deleted. Can anything good come out of people such as Guy Zyskind and Kyle Samani? I doubt it.
Is it a blockchain? Is it an L2? What is Fhenix?
Their website tagline says that it’s the most secured blockchain ever built. However, as we will see shortly, the blockchain is nowhere to be seen. In the line just below they also state that it’s an ETH L2. So is it a blockchain, or is it an L2? If you go check their homepage their final answer seems to be that Fhenix is an Eth L2. Therefore Fhenix is not a blockchain and even the L2 is nowhere to be seen because Testnet (as written on their homepage) is scheduled for Q1 2024 and still not launched at the time of writing (while they call themselves the most secured blockchain ever built)
We will have to wait and see what they deliver, so far however Fhenix perfectly fits the definition of buzzword scam.
Dero is the only programmable L1 to have FHE grade privacy
If you’re looking for an FHE L1 then to date the only L1 offering FHE grade privacy is DeroHE. Dero uses the account model, all accounts are encrypted and updated homomorphically in encrypted state. As I explained in one of my previous articles, since in a blockchain only additions and subtractions are done, any claims of FHE (which is defined as encryption scheme that allows multiplications and additions contemporaneously) should be a instant red flag for buzzword scams because Dero’s El Gamal HE scheme already delivers the same privacy as any hypothetical FHE scheme. Dero also already has a lively defi ecosystem, few examples:
- Dero’s GUI superwallet Engram. I strongly recommend downloading the latest release here to start exploring Dero’s capabilities yourself.
- User minting tokens directly from Dero’s Engram defi superwallet.
- Me perusing Derodex on desktop.
- Users posting feedback on the community built Dero mobile wallet with dex integrated.
Join Dero’s Discord here
